YOU don't have to be old to be nostalgic - but it helps.

Nowadays we put on rose-tinted contact lenses to convince us that our memories were of such happy times, because spectacles are old hat.

In future, they will have amber micro-chip, retro-vision enhancers.

We do tend to look back with delusional warmth.

We forget that in those childhood days with mum and dad at the seaside - when "every day was a sunny day" - it was actually freezing on the beach at Bridlington; a gale off the North Sea blew sand on your boiled egg; and you were made to wriggle out of your swimming cossie under a wet towel convinced the whole world was peeping. Crisps weren't ready-salted, you had to struggle to untwist the little blue bag of salt and try to spread it evenly through the packet. Ah, salt. It's almost banned as a stroke-inducing killer.

But if life today is the nostalgia of tomorrow, I wonder what sort of things future, future generations will consider quaint.

I notice that Pickering Diesel Rally was held at the weekend. They also have a steam traction rally. Again the sweet whiff of nostalgia.

Will future generations look back at our modes of transport and regret their passing? Will they sigh over solar-powered cars and supersonic aircraft, when all they have to do is press a button on their wrist control panel to be transported anywhere in the universe by matter transference?

Will they look at computers and mobile phones, emails and text messaging with disdain as they just have to think a conversation with a friend, thanks to an electronic implant in the head?

And what about photos of the kids and holiday snaps? These days we consider film a throwback, everything is digital. We record our life and family on digital video and play it back through the telly.

Will all that stuff be the content of museums of antiquity in a world where holiday photos are actually lifelike 3D holograms, smells included?

Will they marvel at a green and pleasant land, where people cook meals, do their own washing and where lots of people have gardens and actually grow flowers; while in their own concrete and plastic world, a pallid population lives in tiny, space-saving pods, presses a button to produce an instant, synthetic meal and exposure to sunlight is too dangerous to comprehend? Or would they just fall over laughing like those metal Martians in the old mashed potato advert?

But let's press the rewind button and go back a bit. If a medieval peasant somehow awoke in the 21st century, what would he think if he saw everyone walking around with a little box pressed to their ears and seemingly muttering to themselves?

What would he think to abusive youngsters hanging about on the streets when they should be labouring during daylight hours from the age of three?

How would he cope with the sight of millions of metal carriages whizzing around the roads (roads that are just potholed and not rutted like in his days) and not a horse in sight; or giant, metallic, noisy birds that don't even have to flap their wings, with hordes of drunken holidaymakers being disgorged from the birds' bellies?

Imagine his reaction to supermarkets, where everything is wrapped in something called plastic and food (which you don't have to kill or grow yourself) has to be eaten by a use-by date or discarded; or finding that the village healer is so hard up he turns you away without treatment.

And what would he make of EastEnders, Big Brother and the shopping channels? You're right. He'd be committed to an asylum in the first 24 hours, screaming to be taken back to the rosy glow of his filthy hovel, disease, poverty and back to tugging his forelock to the local warlord.